Coal tunnel threatens home of stars

THE dark-stained, post-and-rail fencing and commanding driveways tell you Coolmore is no ordinary stud. Triple Melbourne Cup winner Makybe Diva and foal ramble in one paddock. Australia's champion sire Fastnet Rock, who could earn up to $50 million in covering fees this year, is in one of the barns. Statues of previous champions like Danehill and Encosta De Lago dot the lawns.

But Coolmore is threatened by coal mines on two fronts: the proposed Drayton South open-cut extension will come up to the ridge to the north, and the notorious Doyles Creek underground mine will come under the paddocks used to rear the stud's weanlings.

Concern for weanlings … Paddy Power is worried a tunnel could disturb the paddocks. Photo: Steven Siewert

The conceptual plan, revealed in community consultations and canvassed at the recent annual meeting of Nucoal Resources, is to build a 500-metre tunnel under the Hunter River to join the Doyles Creek underground mine with the proposed Plashett open cut.

In Sydney last month, Nucoal's chairman, Gordon Galt, told a small group of shareholders about the so-called northern transport option: ''The key thing … is obviously, how does the government feel about having a tunnel under the Hunter River?

''It's not uncommon to have tunnels under rivers, or harbours, as the case may be, so we don't see that as an issue, but it will undoubtedly take them a little while to work their brains across the issue and progress it.''

The president of the Hunter Valley Water Users Association, Arthur Burns, says the outcome, should mining crack the Hunter riverbed, is unthinkable.

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''It hasn't got to be a complete crack,'' he says. ''They can get leakages. The worst possible would be if it completely cracked. If it's a one-in-10-billion chance it's still too many.''

Mr Burns says everything below the Glennies Creek Dam depends on that water: the pipeline to the vineyards and golf courses of Pokolbin, the leading tourist area of the Hunter; the dairy farms; and the Ramsar-listed Hunter Estuary Wetlands.

Nucoal - whose receipt of an exploration licence for a training mine at Doyles Creek will be investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption in March - says there are environmental advantages to the plan, compared with a conveyor over the river, or an alternative ''southern transport'' trucking option.

For Coolmore, privately owned by the Magnier family, the main worry is subsidence from the Doyles Creek underground. Business manager Paddy Power explains that the weanlings paddocks have a gentle slope and undulations perfect for encouraging bone development and fitness of young horses. Mr Power says it is very difficult to find the right soil, topography, and access to water that make the Hunter Valley one of three recognised equine clusters in the world - alongside Newmarket in Britain and Kentucky in America.

''The carnival at Flemington, regarded as one of the greatest in the world, is sourced and fuelled by what happens on this farm here, and what happens on the farms up through the Hunter Valley.'' Mr Power says. ''This is where it all starts. You would hope that we'll do all we can as a nation to protect that.''

Mr Power says the Doyles Creek mine proposal will not be subject to the ''gateway'' assessment under the state government's ''failing'' Strategic Regional Land Use Policy, and contrasts the West Australian government's willingness to protect the Margaret River.

There is a precedent; a four-kilometre tunnel under the Hunter River at Anglo's Dartbrook mine, near Aberdeen, was built in the 1990s. More groundwater flowed into the mine than expected.

A Nucoal opponent, Ian Moore, who has a farm at Appletree flat near Coolmore, complains of a noticeable impact on water quality, which is already poor. ''It's clean up till there, and dirty the other side of it,'' Mr Moore says. That mine's closed down at present, but they are pumping water 24/7 which runs out of the Hunter River into that tunnel.

''If they put a tunnel underneath the Hunter River down at Jerry's Plains, there's no reason why the same thing won't happen again.''